Sexting with the Stars

Washington, DC - For two months, the so-called mainstream media all but ignored the Sept. 11 terror attack in Benghazi, Libya that resulted in four dead Americans. What actions the Obama administration took before, during and after the bloody assaults on the U.S. consulate and a CIA outpost should have been a legitimate election issue. But the Romney campaign only raised the disaster once -- and then avoided it like an outbreak of the Ebola virus.

Now that the election is decided, the Fourth Estate is on the story. Though the president never mentioned the Benghazi debacle in his prepared remarks at this week's press conference -- his first since last March -- fallout from the fiasco in Libya was finally topic number one for the potentates of the press. Of course the question wasn't, "What did you know and when did you know it?" Instead, the lead off question, posed by Ben Feller of the Associated Press, was: "Can you assure the American people that there have been no breaches of national security or classified information in the scandal involving Generals Petraeus and Allen?" The follow up was about whether the "commander in chief and the American people should have been told that the CIA chief was under investigation before the election."

So rather than focus on incompetence, misfeasance and/or malfeasance leading up to, in the midst of, and following a deadly terror attack - President Obama gets a pass by claiming that "There's an ongoing investigation" and that he didn't "want to comment on the specifics of the investigation."

It was a brilliant, audacious diversion. The "reporters" present didn't even question the veracity of Obama's claim that "we're not supposed to meddle in, you know, criminal investigations and that's been our practice." Perhaps they have simply forgotten how he used executive privilege to cover up the details of Operation Fast and Furious and the murder of another American -- Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

The president did pontificate about "FBI protocols" and "certain procedures that both the FBI follow or DOJ follow (sic) when they're involved in these investigations." All this served to cleverly shift the focus from O-Team culpability for death and destruction in Benghazi to what really captures the attention of the media: a salacious sex scandal involving the CIA Director, our senior NATO commander in Afghanistan, at least two attractive women, an FBI agent who sends shirtless images of himself over the Internet and lots of torrid emails. If I wrote plot lines like this for video games and novels, my editors and producers would tell me to come up with more realistic scenarios.

Oliver North is a nationally syndicated columnist, the host of War Stories on the Fox News Channel, the author of the new novel Heroes Proved and the co-founder of Freedom Alliance, an organization that provides college scholarships to the children of U.S. military personnel killed or permanently disabled in the line of duty. Join Oliver North in Israel by going to www.olivernorthisrael.com.